Is Freemium Really Killing the Digital Gaming Industry?

As the popularity of free-to-play games grows, the army of their haters becomes even more crowded. At times it seems that anti-freemium rant is going to push the popularity of the gaming model down, though, with so many people playing and enjoying all that freemium gaming thing, the industry is almost impossible to stop.

Still freemium game model critics isn’t going to stop being that fierce about new mechanics of digital fun stuff. But, if they can’t change the situation, probably they better change the attitude?

Even so, attitude change is going to be tough and painful. Seasoned gamers will keep blaming freemium business model for destroying whole gaming concept. From day one games were designed to entertain but with mobile app trends games turned into a smart mechanism of soaking money out of gamers’ wallets.

Majority of wise gamers also claim that author’s rights on games were violated. There was a moment when game developers created a unique product with outstanding design and concept, whereas now any user can have total control over the process upgrading it whenever his budget allows for the desired enhancements.

In two words, the scenario looks like that:

creating a state of urgency

offering various promotions

leading free users gradually towards paid updates

customizing message for maximum engagement

making a shift from free to premium as easy as possible

It proves that freemium app monetization strategy really works and keeps digging money together with entertainment.

Sounds so true, doesn’t it? But, in fact, this isn’t freemium format itself that keeps wasting gaming experience. Games have always been addictive.

Even when gamers didn’t feel or didn’t want to feel game’s negative psychological impact on their’s lives, it still was extremely powerful.

And just like being an addict, games have always been a money-making machine. All gaming industry is built on psychological tricks that foster deeper and deeper engagement into a game. All of them encourage more play and thus require more money for a gamer to keep the score. But the most important thing is that these tactics had been used long before a mobile phone got smart or even before touchscreen technology became widely used.

Has something ever changed? With a mobile industry rapid development, gamers community grew enormously bigger. Naturally, this has made mobile gaming a trend with millions of users involved, of all ages indeed.

Consequently, when mobile gaming industry became everywhere, it became truly promicing to develop a freemium app. Since then all its’ drawbacks, as well as attractions, have become much noticeable.

This coin, however, turns out to have two sides. On the one hand, larger number of game players results in more chances they have to make a gaming niche less pricey and growingly user-friendly.

On the other hand, such massive folk may be a rich source to monetize freemium apps for freemium game developers who are in a search of ways to make money, selling the shoddy product. Unfortunately, there are lots of second-rate freemium games that require spending quite a bunch of money for the game to become more powerful.

Game quality is really another sore point skilled gamers are 100% grumbling at. They are absolutely convinced that mobile games are less exciting than video games used to be. Not necessarily in fact. This is an argument more against the way some particular games work rather than against the industry in general.

It also sounds like video game lovers just can’t get over changes mobile gaming market has to offer. There are dozens of innovative approaches that are going to move the mobile game industry to a brand new level of quality. Let’s just have a sneak peek onto hybrid games, for instance, that promise superior gaming experience through a combination of digital games and physical toys components.

Unfortunately, the quality of mobile games is not the only fault freemium haters are picking on. Excessive ads are what drive users crazy. Well, in all fairness, the main reason to develop mobile games is to bring game developers more revenue through freemium advertising.

But as the internet can’t exist without huge advertising unit, mobile gaming platform as a part of web space, can’t do without ads either. That means you simply can’t get rid of annoying commercials. But instead you can expect advertisements to become more entertaining. This is where free-to-play games have plenty room for improvement.

As for the rest, the freemium gaming industry appears to have more attractions than drawbacks. Its biggest merit is that independent game developers now have more chances to put their mobile game masterpiece at the public display and successfully market it. Of course, they might have a limited budget but it serves more as an incentive to be creative rather than a discouragement.

From here, the more creativity they put into game design, the higher quality product they will eventually come up with. This way freemium gaming may become a safer industry for customers.

All sides considered, freemium is definitely not that very destroying element that may cause troubles to a game industry. Instead, it should be taken as a push that game developers should use to multiply their revenue at the same time giving all gamers a unique, customized and pleasurable playing experience without much worry about their budgets.